Official Site: http://eye.streumon-studio.com/
Steam Page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/91700/
Source: Youtube Channel maceman1984
Developer: Streum On Studio
Publisher: Streum On Studio
Platforms: PC (Steam)
Release Date: July 29, 2011
Genre: First-Person Shooter/RPG
Pros:
-Tons of ways to build your character to fit your playing style
-Highly immersive environments with atmospheric settings
-Open-world exploration allows players to fulfill missions in any order
-Maps are huge and levels can be quite memorable
Cons:
-The game mechanics are as convoluted as the storyline
-User-interface and menu system is atrocious
-Game crashes very often and full of bugs
-Combat can be irritating and annoying to downright stupid
-Objectives can be vague and confusing
-A lot of long load times with the chance of the game crashing when loaded
E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy is bleeding with potential. It encompasses the many elements of what an open-world, cyber-futuristic, Action FPS/RPG could and should be but is delivered so poorly that it was more painful than pleasure to play. The game features gigantic maps with truly mesmerizing environments with the ability to customize in all sorts of ways to play aggressively, stealthy, technical, or something in between; however, there's so much going on with attribute points, upgrades, and abilities that it makes for a confusing puzzle to figure out what works and what doesn't. The story is told through character dialogues which are not voice acted and are printed in a custom print that's a bit exhausting to read. It doesn't really matter as the story itself was a long, ambiguous question of "who am I" as the main character has lost their memory in the very beginning. It was fun running around an open-world environment and occasionally having some good fights, but the game left me agitated with how broken combat can be, irritated by the constant crashes when moving to the next map, annoyed by the gratuitous amounts of loading and its duration it took, and befuddled by the game mechanics and some of the mission objectives that I couldn't enjoy the game. Those willing to sit down and go through every bit of the game's core game mechanics and experiment with them might be able to find entertainment value out of the game. But for most gamers, this would be more punishment than play for one who just wants to enjoy the game.
Aesthetics
One of the more notable aspects of E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy is the atmospheric setting it places the player in. The futuristic cyber-punk world is dark but lighted with neon signs everywhere with eerie and subtle background music. There's a bit of Asian influence throughout the game with Chinese characters going through some of the screens and character designs influenced by Japanese samurai armor. For an indie game worked on by 10 people, the overall look of the game is very impressive and praise worthy. Unfortunately, some aspects were overlooked and affected the gameplay immensely. When getting shot at, the screen flashes red quite violently. When blocking bullets with a sword, yellow and blue light flashes. When combined together with a lot of enemies firing at the player, it is near impossible to see where one was going or where they are facing. This made fighting groups of enemies incredible annoying, especially at the end of the game when 7-10 elites are firing at you with an aerial combat vehicle firing down at you at the same time. Then there's the sniper scope. Nearly 75% of the screen is covered by a tint of yellow when the player zooms in with the sniper rifle which needlessly obscures the player's vision from targeting the enemy. And as enchanting as the environment can be, there are quite a few instances where everything is just so dark that it's difficult to find your way around a level. Finally, there's the user-interface for the menu system. Everything is just listed and separated into different tabs. The menu is so disorganized and cluttered and it's a hassle to use every it was necessary. Actions didn't even have labels until you hovered over a button to figure out what it did. Getting an upgrade was expensive and rare and so the player would have to go through all the upgrades each time to figure out which worked best for them. It just wasn't really worth utilizing every part of the game's mechanics because of how convoluted it looked and worked. The level designs truly deserves some merits and maybe even the audio, but sadly everything else lacked organization, refinement, and afterthought when being implemented into the game. Aesthetics: 3/10
Buttons
The game plays mostly like an FPS with the RPG elements as the background basis for the game's progressive growth mechanic and so those who are familiar with FPS games on keyboard and mouse will be familiar with the controls to this game. For the most part, the core controls (movement and shooting) work pretty well, but peeking out left and right felt like it did very little to provide extra cover for the player. There are a lot of keys that can be used in the game and the tutorial does little to help explain that to the player. Trying to get through the menu was a pain and a chore when needing to hack or look through abilities and it really hindered upon the flow of the game. There have been a LOT of instances where the attack key would just lock up, usually when wielding a sword and it allowed enemies to freely fire at me when I try to attack them or block enemy fire. Combat was alright when it was a few enemies, but later in the game it was always a whole swarm at every side which made combat annoying no matter what build you went for. Guns weren't entirely reliable and so I turned to using my sword a lot, but all that flashing made it hard to see and guns can push a player back when they're blocking so it made for an annoying fight every time near the end of the game. The controls are better than a lot of other FPS games I've played in the past, but everything that should have made the game great (the combat, the abilities, the customization) caused the key layout and user-interface to be quite a mess in the end. Buttons: 4/10
Concept & Content
So the core concept of the game is: walk, talk, kill. It's the way that the player approaches it and does them that's supposed to make it interesting. Walking around can be facilitated with a leg upgrade among others, talking can't be changed but you do have choices to make, and killing all depends on how you want to do it. On paper, everything about this game sounds incredibly fun. When I got into the meat of the game (which was very difficult to do considering how many times the game crashed in the first hour) it was bothersome to try to figure out all the abilities and upgrades, especially when I couldn't get any of them (very expensive). Combat was annoying due to all the different colors flashing when getting hit, blocking, bleeding, stress (yes, your character loses control with stress), being hacked, etc. as well as controls acting up in the middle of a fight. Walking around and talking to characters felt like a waste of time as maps were large (it was cool to look at, but annoying to traverse) and dialogue was boring. The game is riddled with bugs, glitches, and typos which affected game play unexpectedly once in a while, but it happened enough to make note of them. The three things I really like was the levels, hacking into an enemy to cause them to kill their allies, and using melee weapons when it wasn't incredibly annoying to fight. There's actually quite a bit the player can do in terms of upgrading, abilities, and builds, but it did little to console the atrocious menu organization and faulty combat. If the game had simplified and organized the menu system, made the different upgrades easier to understand, improved on certain graphic aspects such as the sniper scope and effects when getting hit, made combat more dynamic rather than just sending waves upon waves of enemies as the challenge, fixed all the bugs and crashes and refined the entire game, it could easily be considered a classic akin to the Deus Ex series which seems to be the major influence for the game. To make a simple analogy out of this, it's as if they took a lot of fresh ingredients for a cake and instead of placing everything meaningfully in an organized fashion, they dumped everything into a blender and presented it to the customer to figure out the taste. I still think the game could be great, but at the moment it's not even a decent game. Concept & Content: 2/10
Duration
Time flies by when you're having fun. But when you are not, time seems to drag on for an eternity. I felt like I had the game forever, and I took so long in finishing it because of how much I dreaded going back to it. I kept coming back to give it a chance each time in hopes that it got better only to have it get worse (the levels got better and better in terms of aesthetics, but was incredibly annoying gameplay wise). The game length itself is actually decent (perhaps short for those expecting Deus Ex), but the flow of the game can be very slow and the irritable aspects of the game only make it feel longer when it isn't. The way the game is set up makes for a very high replay value game, but all its faults and hindrances stops me from ever wanting to play the game ever again (even though it asks you to). When you finish the game, the player is told that this might not even be real and that the player is dreaming. You are then sent back to the beginning of the game. When you finally get to the "true ending", you talk to someone that tells the player about who they are, but nothing that the player hasn't already figured out just from the dialogues of the other NPCs throughout the game. You are then sent back to the beginning of the game again. So in actuality, there is no "real" ending to the game. There's also multiplayer mode, so you can suffer with a friend playing the game and see who's game crashes first. Duration: 2/10
Fun
I can't say that I didn't have fun at all, but I questioned it heavily at the end of the game. When I first started, I didn't like how I could barely see anything at all. The flashlight did very little to help too. In the first hour, I spent the entire time watching tutorial videos within the game that was long and made little sense. In the beginning, you're very weak and you die very easily. So when going down the first area and having to purposely take damage from the fall, it was difficult to get through the first few enemies without them killing me. When I finally made it to HQ (after crashing about 3-5 times), I spent a VERY long time walking around talking to NPCs as it was required and stamina took a long time to recover so I wasn't able to run the entire time. Throughout the game, I struggled through the game's crashes, game menus, combat, and figuring out where to go when coordinates weren't given. After getting to the end and dying about 30 times on the last mission (got one-shotted a lot), I was presented with a really dumb ending. The game left me bitter, irritated, and overall disappointed. The game looked really nice, but everything else about it was half baked when it could've been so much better. The problems with the game were so evident that I'm not even sure if it was worth playing as a study game either, but I guess I should be glad I got to take this experience with me. Fun: 2/10
Overall
I've never given a game this low of a score before, not even to the infamous Golden Axe: Beast Rider which was excruciating to get through. E.Y.E Divine Cybermancy could've been the indie game declared a classic hit or a great iteration to open-world FPS/RPG games, but it's difficult for any player to declare that when they can hardly play it correctly. If this team ever decides to create another game, I hope they can see all their mistakes and create a game that isn't as broken. I really believe that they're capable of doing so if they had more help and/or more time as this game really did have a lot of great ideas. It's nothing they can really do now, so it's just for all of us to move along and place this game along with history. Overall: 2.6/10
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